Climate change vulnerability assessment for smallholder farmers in China: An extended framework

Climate change brings uncertainty and challenges to achieving sustainable development goals. The dually vulnerable regions in terms of the environment and economy are facing substantial threats from climate change; particularly, smallholder farmers who heavily rely on natural ecosystems in these regions are being the most affected. Paying attention to the vulnerability assessment of these regions is conducive to precisely improving the ability of their people to cope with climate change. This study aimed to construct an extended framework of climate change vulnerability assessment at the household level by combining the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vulnerability assessment framework with the sustainable livelihood framework. Four typical regions with different climatic and geographical conditions in China, including the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (marked as AOHAN, representing the type of grassland, similarly hereinafter), Qinghai Province (HYMH, plateau), Yunnan Province (YLNL, mountain), and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (NNQZ, coastal zone), were selected to apply the framework. In total, 29 villages from these four regions were selected at random, and 360 face-to-face interviews were conducted in selected villages based on a pretested questionnaire. The results show that AOHAN had the greatest vulnerability, as well as the highest exposure level among the four regions, which was also the major source of differences in vulnerability. Further analysis shows that although the sensitivity and adaptive capacity showed relatively small differences, the sources of sensitivity and adaptation strategies were quite different among the four regions. In terms of sensitivity, YLNL had the highest level of sensitivity in housing, water, and livestock, and AOHAN assumed the highest sensitivity in land. The advantages and disadvantages in terms of adaptive capacity also varied widely among the four regions. More specifically, AOHAN had a balanced adaptive capacity; YLNL largely relied on the advantages in social and human capitals to compensate for the disadvantage in physical capital; and the strengths in physical and financial capitals are the main sources of adaptive capacities for NNQZ and HYMH, respectively. In general, the vulnerability assessment framework proposed in this study provides guidelines for vulnerability assessments at the household level in the face of climate change. In addition, heterogeneous measures to cope with the threats of climate change should be put forward precisely, based on the climatic, geographical and socioeconomic characteristics of each region.